Category Archives: Government

Every time Congress has taken a serious look at proposals to boost Internet sales taxes, it has rejected them. That’s probably why pro-tax Senators are trying to rush through an online tax hike with as little consideration as possible.

As early as Monday, the Senate will vote on a bill that was introduced only last Tuesday. The text of this legislation, which would fundamentally change interstate commerce, only became available on the Library of Congress website over the weekend. And you thought ObamaCare was jammed through Nancy Pelosi‘s Democratic House in a hurry.

. . .

Mr. Enzi’s Marketplace Fairness Act discriminates against Internet-based businesses by imposing burdens that it does not apply to brick-and-mortar companies. For the first time, online merchants would be forced to collect sales taxes for all of America’s estimated 9,600 state and local taxing authorities.

New Hampshire, for example, has no sales tax, but a Granite State Web merchant would be forced to collect and remit sales taxes to all the governments that do. Small online sellers will therefore have to comply with tax laws created by distant governments in which they have no representation, and in places where they consume no local services.

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The drivers of this rush to tax are Wal-Mart and other big retailers that can more easily absorb the costs of collection than can smaller competitors. Also supporting the bill is Internet giant Amazon, which coincidentally now sells its own tax compliance service to other merchants. Adding to the lobbying muscle are state and local governments. The politicians believe they’ll collect tens of billions of dollars in taxes that are already owed by shoppers on remote sales but rarely paid.

So big business and big government are uniting to pursue their mutual interest in sticking it to the little guy. Any Internet seller with more than $1 million in annual sales would be forced to serve all of the nation’s tax collectors.

Which is pretty much what Adam Smith predicted in Wealth of Nations. I’m sure that the taxing agencies will collect more tax dollars, but at the expense of driving small internet based businesses out of business. I wonder if the added cost of government support for bankrupt business owners and employees is more or less than the projected increase in tax revenues, never mind the actual increase in revenues.

There is indeed nothing new under the sun. This in nowhere more true than when speaking of human folly.

Kyrie eleison.

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.— Marcus Tullius Cicero

Recently an addle brained MSNBC commentator proposed the idea that the “community” (read STATE) rather than parents ought to bear the primary responsibility for the care and raising of children. In the video below Zo gets it exactly right, what is being proposed is slavery. Only it is a higher form of slavery because now the slaves are not privately owned but are owned by the government. If the Left had their way we would all be Gulag bait.

According to advance reports, the administration’s budget due out on Wednesday will propose a cap limiting the amount of annual return a retirement account can create to $205,000. If that proposal were enacted today, that would mean retirement accounts would be limited to $3 million in assets. The White House estimates that caps on the tax-preferred accounts would generate $9 billion over 10 years.

According to a new analysis from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, only around 0.06 percent of total IRA account holders had $3 million as of the end of 2011, and 0.0041 percent of 401(k) accounts had $3 million as of the end of 2012.

“I think a lot of what people are missing about this is this is most likely going to be very, very difficult from an administrative complexity standpoint for employers to deal with this,” says Jack VanDerhei, research director at EPRI.

That’s a no squidder. But there’s a simple solution. Create a federal bureaucracy to handle the problem! And once the American sheeple get used to the idea that the government can take care of our retirement accounts, it would be unfair to limit that care to the wealthy. Lower the upper limits gradually so that the middle class and then everybody can share in the wonderful Centralized Retirement Assistance Plan (CRAP). They’ve done so well with Social Security, after all.